PERCEPTION
“Modern
psychology has shown us that much of what we call ‘perception’ is not a
straightforward taking in the world around us … but is strongly biased by our
beliefs and conditioning so that our perception is slanted to validate what we
already believe[1]
This is obviously very true; but not
all perceptions are misperceptions; it
is a matter of degree. My perceptual world may be more or less true of reality.
At a very intimate level, between persons, there can be times when I do
perceive how it is for another. There are times when I am in touch and times
when I am hopelessly out of touch and my observations are biased.
Let
me illustrate this simplified view of perception. Say there is this great
movie. It’s full of passion and intrigue, drama and humour, a colourful
storyline full of fascinating characters. Now suppose you go to this movie and
you are a bit deaf so that you miss some of the dialogue; or that you are
worried and distracted; or that the gay relationships in the movie are against
Bible teaching; or suppose the hero reminds you of a once hated schoolmaster;
or maybe there was too much kinky sex. In any of these instances your
perceptions of the film will be limited or distorted. You will edit out
aspects, or simply miss certain subtleties of the film. The question becomes; how much of the total reality of the movie
can you take in? How much does your mind act like a reducing value?
Now
lets say you, you yourself, are the
equivalent of a movie: you have highly complex history. Like everyone you are a
person of many characters and moods, each with a colourful and intricate
storyline. Now let’s take a person who has known you, a friend, a partner
maybe: they have witnessed hundreds of your performances – you have been on
view day after day. They know you well we would suppose, but the crucial
question is: how much of your total reality can they take in. How broad a
spectrum of you can they get. How much do
they project their own feelings into your story, how much do they edited out,
reinterpret or just neglect. Based on insufficient or distorted perception they
can then make judgments that are equally inappropriate. Whatever their
interactions with you, whatever they have to say to you, it won’t come out
right, or their timing will be wrong.
You
cannot be in sync with anything you cannot fully perceive. Perception is the
awareness of how things are. Put
simply, when a person perceives how things are they will make the right choices
at the right times; if there is distortion of perception then their choices and
actions will be out of sync with the flow of events.
When
we perceive the total flow of life around us we make the right choices. When we
are cut off from the environment then our choices are wrong. We think our
choices are made by weighing up the circumstances – ‘weighing up’ as a thinking
operation. But our choices are not made by thought, but by prior perception.
You
don’t need to be a good judge of life or worry about your decisions. It’s like
when you drive a car, the rightness of your actions, your judgment, is totally
dependent on the full perception of the moment to moment flow of traffic. Your
perception flows directly into your action. To go straight from perception to
action is the ultimate form of self-trust.
*
Nothing
marks off modernity so much as the evolving relationship between the sexes. We
have come a long way since 1879 when Kate Sheppard campaigned for women’s right
to vote; but as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement she would
surely have been shocked to learn that 100 years later we are about to legalise
same sex marriages.
Different styles of relationships
that are now acceptable have made traditional marriage merely one of many
alternatives. As this social fluidity evolves it requires a much greater
psychological sophistication to deal with it. And even within marriage there
are alternative arrangements that were unthinkable in the past. We need a new
psychological orientation that can cope with the fluidity of modern relationships.
The psyche has to catch up with what is actually the case in modern society.
As
one generation replaces another, the established parental downloads gradually
mutate and society as a whole changes. But the changes are not smooth. On the
relationship level there is tension not only between partners, but between
different parts of oneself. The battle is between the older unconscious
orientations and the newly emerging ones. There can be tension too, as one
partner moves psychologically faster than the other. A typical difficulty is
the emergence of the woman as a person in her own right. The situation is
seldom static. Within the same relationship there can be oscillating waves of
regression and progression. It’s like the complex flow of the weather, unpredictable
with sudden changes of mood.
What
struggles to emerge is a broader spectrum of perception. This broader
perspective is everything we mean be ‘person-centred’. How you actually perceive the other person is crucial;
how broad a spectrum of their actual being can you accept as actually existing. If your filter is
such that you see the other as a role
your perception will be limited to just that. If the person is only a ‘son’, a
‘wife’, a ‘mother’ calling up the old archetypes, then your present-time
perception will be inadequate.
Its
not a question of being ‘judgmental’. Its about something much more basic than
that – one’s very perception of people is already a judging. Unless, that is,
you are really in touch.
contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz
(03) 981 2264
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